News web sites have become a convenient tool for providing up-to-date news information. News providers are capable of providing large sites that provide news content for millions of unique users each day. Currently existing news web sites include various tools to help editors and producers build story pages and interactive components such as live vote and slide show components. However, current architectures have been insufficient to provide efficient and cost effective results in view of increasingly complex business and partnership proposals.
One specific problem area is the lack of content reusability and flexibility. Currently, providers use multiple databases and file systems to store site contents and multiple applications and tools to create and manage the site content. Moreover, the content is not separated from the presentations. The lack of separation makes content repurposing difficult.
A further problem with current architectures is the inadequate speed of the replication process. In general, existing systems build the pages and place them on a staging server at regular intervals, for example on an hourly basis. Replication software replicates the contents and delivers the replicated contents to web servers. The replication process can be time consuming and no editorial work can be done during the replication process, thus impeding the web site's ability to be a breaking news site.
An additional problem with existing architectures is the lack of a unified rendering architecture. Five or six different methods produce the final HTML pages for news sites. The multiple methods result in redundant systems and unnecessary maintenance efforts. Additionally, inconsistent representations of site content result from the multiple methods.
A further difficulty with present systems involves the lack of support for multiple site rendering. Under current implementations, only one site can be rendered for an 800×600 resolution screen. Accordingly, supporting site partners, such as news magazine partners, is extremely time-consuming and can lead to disadvantageous constraints.
A further difficulty with existing systems is the lack of real time statistics. Currently existing systems generate usage reports by processing user access logs produced by an Internet server such as an Internet Information Server (IIS). By the time the reports are generated, the news can be several days old. For example, for the Winter Olympics sites of 2002, the final statistics and reports, including information regarding page views, hits, unique users, etc., weren't obtained until a week after the games were completed. Real time statistics allow editors to adjust content strategy to better cater to user interests.
Accordingly, a system is needed for correcting the above-mentioned problems. A unified content store is needed that represents and manages content in a single consistent environment and supports a single consistent rendering architecture. Additionally, the system must support on-demand publishing, content archiving, multi-site rendering, and real-time statistics. A system is needed that will bring a high degree of automation to the publishing process to simplify workflow.